Current Time in Libertad, Philippines

Libertad is one of the largest districts of Butuan, the regional centre of Caraga in the north-east of Mindanao, in the southern Philippines. It lies a few kilometres west of the city centre, on the flat coastal plain between the lower Agusan River and the shore of Butuan Bay, in green, low-lying country threaded with creeks. The climate is tropical and evenly warm, with rain in every month and no true dry season, and the city lies outside the main typhoon belt, which has long made it one of the more sheltered places in the archipelago.

The built-up area around Libertad is home to something over a quarter of a million people, within a city of more than three hundred and seventy thousand. Butuan is a highly urbanised city and the administrative, commercial and educational hub for the whole Caraga region, and Libertad serves as one of its principal residential and commercial districts, with its own market, schools, churches, subdivisions and businesses strung along the national highway.

The district's importance, however, goes far beyond its size, because Libertad is one of the most significant archaeological sites in South East Asia. In 1976 diggers working in the waterlogged soil here uncovered the remains of ancient plank-built boats. Known as balangay, they were joined with wooden dowels and lashings rather than nails, and the oldest has been dated to around the fourth century AD, making them the earliest pre-Hispanic watercraft found in the Philippines. Nine have so far been located, and several have been declared National Cultural Treasures.

The boats confirmed what Chinese records had long suggested, that Butuan was a wealthy maritime trading polity between roughly the tenth and thirteenth centuries, sending envoys to the Song court and exchanging gold, beeswax and forest products for porcelain and silk with China, Champa and the kingdoms of Java and Sumatra. Gold ornaments of extraordinary craftsmanship have been recovered from the same ground and now rank among the great treasures of Philippine museums.

The Balangay Shrine Museum in Libertad shelters one of the vessels where it was found and is the main attraction of the district, while every May the city celebrates the Balangay Festival with street dancing and decorated boats. Elsewhere in Butuan visitors find the national museum branch, the ruined seventeenth-century church at Banza and the eco-park at Magallanes, where local tradition holds that the first Catholic Mass in the islands was celebrated in 1521, a claim long debated with the island of Limasawa.

Local life is Butuanon and Cebuano speaking, with a strong Catholic calendar, lively street food and a taste for river and sea fish. The economy rests on trade, agro-industry and wood processing, a legacy of the days when Butuan was called the timber city of the south.

Caraga State University and Father Saturnino Urios University draw students from across the region, while Bancasi airport, buses along the Mindanao highways and jeepneys and tricycles handle daily travel.

Libertad is important as the place where the ancient boats of Butuan were found, a district that holds the proof of the Philippines' deep seafaring past.